August 6, 2010

My husband often sends me links to articles from a blog he follows called bnet.com. I typically find the business hacks and tips they provide there to be very enlightening and usually very helpful. However, I stumbled upon an article on there this evening that completely lacked the insight that I have come to expect from Bnet.

In this article, Rick Broida touts that the new Hotmail interface is superior to Gmail, offering a variety of features that you cannot get in Gmail. My thoughts about his comments are as follows.

*First of all, Gmail lets you theme your account so that it looks like whatever you want it to look like. If your Gmail account is ugly, then that's your own fault.

*Labels are far superior to folders because you can apply MULTIPLE labels to one message and then archive it! I dread the idea of having to open and close multiple folders looking for a specific message. There's no mention here of Hotmail having a search feature as powerful as Gmail's.

*I already view YouTube videos directly in my Gmail every time I get a video link. As well as Picasa Album photos and other media too... it's called Google Labs! Does Hotmail have the track record of infinitely expanding its own features? The capabilities that are existant within Google Labs for Gmail are enough alone to wipe out any current competition for webmail, IMO.

*I have filters set up in Gmail to show me only messages from my Facebook/ Twitter/ eBay/ Craigslist/ YouTube (and many more) accounts already. In fact, they are color-coded labels, so they jump out at me easily when I scan my regular Inbox.

Oh and I was going to fire up my old hotmail account to log in and look at the new features before posting this (SkyDrive integration does sound cool), but after one attempt to log on with an incorrect password Windows Live told me I had tried to sign in too many times with an incorrect e-mail address or password. So I chose to reset my password and get reset instructions emailed to me. Hotmail then told me that they would send those instructions to, you guessed it, my hotmail account.